


An Angel in a Hospital Bed

by humanedisaster



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Cas is still an angel, M/M, Quasi Steampunk, dean is a country doctor, quasi deiselpunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 08:56:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1976820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humanedisaster/pseuds/humanedisaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is just a doctor. He just takes care of his patients and tries to deal with the war around him and the shadows of the war on his mind. </p><p>Until he gets called to the aid of an injured man in a cemetery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Angel in a Hospital Bed

**Author's Note:**

> Background Amelia/Sam and in passing Garth/Becky. Happy family Bobby/Ellen, and also wheelchair!Bobby.
> 
> There's no graphic violence, but there is **clinical descriptions of pretty severe wounds and mentions of warfare** , so be safe if that triggers you.

The city of Lawrence is smack in the middle of the Middle Kingdom.

It’s one of the largest cities in the mid-west, second only to Chicago. There is absolutely no reason for Lawrence to be one of the biggest cites in the Middle Kingdom (fourth behind New York, Los Angeles, and, again, Chicago). It has very few agricultural advantages, it’s landlocked with no large rivers or outstanding water sources.

However, it is the center of the War on Earth.

As long as anyone could remember there had been a War going. Technically, the war had been waging for two thousand years, but in the eyes of the two fronts waging it, that was barely the blink of an eye. It was only to the humans, caught in the crossfire, that suffered for the length of the war.

Because the War was between two Archangels.

On one side, there was Michael. The chosen son. The obedient soldier of the Almighty God and all His Might. With him stood the good peoples of the North, those who would fight to the death to defend their God, and all he represented. He wanted order and justice, for God was fair, kind, gracious, and generous to his people.

His opposer was Lucifer. The outcast. The rebel to His Might. He gathered to himself people who did not want a tyrannical God, no matter how benign.  He wanted freedom to do as he saw fit, to be unhindered by what he saw as archaic, unfit laws, set by those who didn’t know the people’s plight.

But his idea of freedom was turning people into the worst kinds of people and damning them to Hell. To bring them back as his Demons.

They were both once the right and left hand to God himself, his oldest sons, his favored sons. They were the best of friends, trusting each other with their lives. They fought side by side, the way they completed each others' movement was so fluid and complete they were never once defeated. They were happy. That is, until God made the Fallen Peoples of the Middle Kingdom. Michael saw their father's decision as just, strictly because their father made it, while Lucifer thought the peoples were grotesque barbarians, monkey’s throwing feces. 

So Lucifer left, taking with him many more of the Host of the North, torturing them to his will, swearing to wreck vengeance on his ignorant father and spineless brother.

And so they waged war on one another, ignoring the bloodshed for what they saw as right. Angels fought Demons, humans fought humans, and for two thousand years nowhere saw peace or happiness.

So, because of this War, Lawrence has the highest crime rate and largest average of exhaust warnings. The city is split into three zones and built on four layers.

The lowest layer, the one with the crime and poverty and pain, is commonly nicknamed Purgatory. All the shady dealings with secret Demon insurgents and black trading happens in Purgatory, mostly because it is the easiest place to do it, as you can’t go outside without a gas mask from all the exhaust and inescapable toxic chemicals, so no one ever sees anyone else’s face. Purgatory is where humans go, in times of great turmoil and need to sell their lives to Lucifer’s Army.

The next layer belongs to the working class. It’s where the city’s engineers and workers live and work and raise their families. It doesn’t have the permanent night that Purgatory suffers, but the light is artificial and broken. The exhaust isn’t as bad, but on high exhaust days, most wear the masks anyway, to stay safe from the lung trauma it can cause.

Then there is the business layer. This is where all the public transportation is and where the people do their shopping. While is does receive some natural light, most days the smog keeps it blocked out and the street lights are turned on, even at high noon.

The top layer is where the social and political elite live and make decisions for the rest of the population of Lawrence.

The three zones work as such:

The Red Zone, which is the city proper, where you encounter the previous layers.

The White Zone, which is where the military is bunkered and from which they defend the civilians within their walls.

And then there is the Black Zone. Much like Purgatory, most just carry their gas masks with them, for fear of the exhaust sirens catching them unawares. It’s a place for the middle class that rests just adjacent to the actual city. If the Black Zone were anywhere else and if Lawrence were any other city, the Zone would be a suburb.

But that’s not the case.

-

Being a healer during a time of war is kind of like trying to fix a broken dam with a handful of corks. No matter how many you shove into it, there will always be another crack, some more water, and not enough time.

To tell God’s honest truth, Dean hadn’t even wanted to be a healer. It was sort of thrust on him when his leg got irreparably damaged in the War. He had been in a special operations unit, working to take down a nest of Demons from the inside when they’d made a wrong turn into a room full of at least sixty of the fuckers having a pow wow about their next moves.

Now, Dean was a good fighter, fantastic even, and so was everyone in his unit, but six against sixty is never a good set of odds. Only he and his brother had made it out alive, and while Sam was spic and span after a couple weeks of recuperation, Dean’s mangled left leg never healed right. He was honorably discharged and since Sam’s enlistment time was up he stayed by Dean’s side in the Black Zone.

For months, Dean was listless, and Angry. Angry with a capital A, because Winchesters don’t get depressed. He snapped at everyone, bitter about not being the soldier he always wanted to be, the soldier his father was proud of, and what finally pulled him out of it was the most surprising thing.

A boy, Dean later found out his name was Jesse, was laying in a bed two down from Dean’s own. He was writhing in pain, back bowed to an incredible arc over the bed, as two nurses tried to poor some toxic looking syrup down his throat. “Aye!” Dean had shouted, “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s got the Cold,” one of the nurses replied, and Dean shuttered in sympathy. The Cold was the worst of any Demon induced sickness. A cold black vision that slowly overtook your sight until you were blind. A body racking shiver that made you writhe in pain and cold, no matter how swaddled you were or how warm the room. A sense of despair that you couldn’t shake until you gave up and your body fell into decline. There was no cure, only a way to take away the person's consciousness, so they wouldn't know they were dying.

Dean stumbled over to the boy’s bed, still not used to his cane (something they say is temporary, that while he’ll never walk right again, he’ll be able to walk unaided, if with a limp, soon enough). He placed one hand on the boy’s chest, pressing him into the bed and rubbed in soothing circles until the boy was barely wriggling back and forth. Dean squeezed the boy’s nostrils shut between his thumb and forefinger until his mouth popped open, prompting the nurse to pour the syrup into it. Dean moved the hand on his nose to his throat and rubbed it until the liquid had eased down from his mouth.

The doctor looked at Dean and clapped him on the soldier. “Maybe you’ve found your calling, son.”

Dean looked up at the older man and pursed his lips together, thinking.

It had taken him a while, but finally he admitted to himself that he did seem to have a way with healing that he didn’t have with killing. Even in the army, he always felt more comfortable driving the car or calming down his boys after a particularly grading mission. It came much more naturally to him to ease a colicky baby’s tummy or stitch up a farmer’s hand after a tractor accident than it ever was to kill some poor faceless schmuck who believed in what he was doing just as much as Dean did.

Years passed of fixing broken bones, trying to help homecoming soldiers deal with their pain, mental or physical, making the final days of elderly people that Dean had seen around the Zone for his entire life more comfortable.

Life in the Black Zone was much calmer than the life of a soldier.

So when Garth, a squirrelly looking boy that sometimes helped Dean and Sam with things around the Office, came bursting into Exam Room Five, (Where Dean was trying to convince Misses Johnson that, “Yes, the balm will help her aching joints, no, I’m not trying to poison you because I got grounded once for throwing a ball through your kitchen window.”) yelling something about a body found in the cemetery, Dean was a little confused.

“Woah, woah, calm down, Garth. Now, a little more relaxed this time, tell me what the hell is going on?”

“My dad! When he was out to cut the grass in the cemetery this morning, he found a body, he says he thinks it’s alive, but he’s not sure, because he didn’t want to get too close, you know, and he said to run to you to see if you could come down and see yourself, seeing as how you’re the town doctor and would know if a body was alive or dead, you know?”

While Garth seemed to say that all in one breath, Dean was used to it, and able enough to parse out the sum of it. “Alright. Misses Johnson, please use the balm, Garth, you go get Sam to pull the car around, and I’ll go get my bag.”

He hobbled out of the room, to his office in the next room. He carefully threw together a bag of bare essentials: some splints, bandages, antiseptic and anti-curse balms, pain relieving syrups. Then he grabbed his jacket, pulling the hood with the attached mask over his head and snapping it to his face, then he hooked the bag up to his shoulder and hobbled back out to the hallway, almost bumping into Sam.

“Garth said something about a body?” his brother asked voice muffled and nasal from asking through his own mask, taking the bag from Dean, shouldering it himself. Dean rolled his eyes behind his goggles, he had long accepted the fact that his gait would forever make his brother think he was an invalid, but usually Sam wasn’t this bad. Dean had fallen about a week ago, slipped on some ice, and when he tried to brace himself on his bad leg, he’d collapsed to the ground, howling in pain, being laid up for two whole days after.

“Yeah, found it in the cemetery.”

“Isn’t that where bodies belong?” Sam asked, smirking.

Dean shoved at his shoulder and was pleased when Sam lightly slammed into the wall. “Mister Fitzgerald thinks the body’s alive, but he didn’t want to touch it for obvious reasons, hence calling me in to see.”

By now they were at the car and Dean hopped into the driver’s seat way less gracefully than he ever did before being injured. After he was condemned to never walk the same again, he could only ever really feel comfortable there, in the driver’s seat. You don’t need fantastic legs to drive well, and while he’d always loved his Baby (because what is a classic, first line Impala if not a precious Baby to be cherished with all your heart?), after his leg seemed to be taken away, it became a rock in his life, when everything else seemed to be a tidal wave.

The car had been his father's, bought before he married his mother. His mother hadn't trusted the diesel powered contraption, previously used to the steam landboat her father had given her as a graduation present, but his father had insisted the combustion engine was the future.

Both of his parents had been in the Army, his father was a technician and his mother was a pretty important special operation commander (which is the only reason Dean had even thought to do it himself, to feel that closeness with his mother), who specialized in the aerial side of warfare. By the end of Mary’s career, she was in control of an entire fleet of Zeppelins that regularly attacked Demon camps and won more often than not. Mary had actually met John on the first Zeppelin she was captain of, where he was the head engineer.

They had retired from the Army when Mary found out she was pregnant with Dean. She decided to use her degree in history and insight in warfare to write a book about the Wars, while his father got a job as a mechanic and handy man. When Dean was born, they moved into the house Sam and Dean live in now, a nicer place on Main Street in the Black Zone, that the boys later retrofitted the ground floor of into the Office where they now work.

Mary Winchester died when Dean was a tender age of six, a week after his birthday. The entire family (John, Mary, Dean and a year old Sammy) had been out celebrating Dean’s birthday at his favorite diner in the city, on the Business Layer. They left early because Dean was excited to go home and eat the blueberry pie his mother made him special for the occasion. They piled into the Impala with Dean holding tight onto Sam in the backseat (a treat for the birthday boy, usually Mary held her youngest son in the car) and were leaving he city when a patrol tank slammed into the passenger side where Mary sat.

John was a changed man after his wife’s death, never quite recovering from it. He drowned himself in work and alcohol. He never abused the boys, not in the way that was noticeable. He didn’t hit them or blame them or anything like that, it was more what he didn’t do. He didn’t hug his sons, didn’t meet their eyes, didn’t show his love. Sam grew up resenting his father, blaming him for the militaristic life they lived, as when John didn’t know how to deal with his children he ordered them around like soldiers instead of sitting down to talk to them like children.

But Dean, he just did what his father asked. He took care of Sam. He took care of him. He took care of their house. Because that’s what Mary would have wanted. She wouldn’t want her boys starving or miserable. And Dean was nothing if not his mother’s son.

The jerk of Sam closing the back after putting the bag in the trunk woke Dean from his reverie. He turned over the ignition and turned out from the alley beside the Office into the main road. The smog was as bad as the radio had said it would be, so Dean flicked on the fog lights, which cut through the abundant exhaust enough so that he could see down the road.

Quick enough the car was chugging along and they were moving smoothly towards the cemetery.

-

When they arrived at the cemetery, Dean eased himself out of the car and moved around towards the back of his baby, gently running his fingers along the side of her. Sam was already there, pulling out Dean’s bag. “For God’s sake, Sam! I’m not an invalid!” He jerked the bag out of Sam’s grasp and shouldered it. “I know I fell a couple weeks ago. It happens. It doesn’t change the two and a half years I got around just fine!”

He twisted around and started moving towards the lump in the middle of the path twenty yards away, that he assumed was the body Mister Fitzgerald found. Noticing that Sam was following, he turned his head to face him and shook his head, pointing at the Impala. “Wait there.”

Sam did his dumb constipated face he made when he thought Dean was being stubborn. “Dean. Come on.”

Dean rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Sam. I’ve got this. I’m a grown ass adult and I don’t need you to fucking coddle me. Get over it and let me do my job!” He turned back to the lump of body and started forward.

The closer Dean got, the more obvious it became that whatever was laying there was not human. It’s presence alone seemed like a warm aura, shining brightly but without light. It seemed to warm Dean from the inside, which was heartening on this Level Six sort of day.

It was only when Dean realized that the thing -- well, things -- covering the body weren’t a blanket or canvas but wings that he knew what it was.

An Angel.

-

The angel was laying on his side, legs, arms, and wings at awkward angles, like they were broken. The leather of his battle armor was biting into his pale white skin, the fur lining doing nothing to soften its hard edges. Dean could see his blood clumping in his long hair, slowly saturating it, root to tip. He couldn’t even tell what color the angel’s hair was due to the abundance of drying blood.

Careful not to move him, Dean checked his back to make sure it wasn’t misaligned, then gently checking his neck and head. The bones seemed fine, though there was a massive gash on the side of his head, cutting down into his ear, which was almost taken off. Slowly and gently, Dean turned the angel onto his back, careful of his wings, so that he could see if there were any more wounds. The angel’s white under-tunic was covered in blood, and as Dean looked closer, he could see it was due to small but deep scratches covering his arms, between his bracers and leather breast plate. One of the bracers was only barely hanging on by one strap and his forearm was at a ninety degree angle, broken.

Dean pulled out a splint from his bag and carefully but firmly grabbed the angel’s broken arm and set it. He carefully wrapped the arm and lifted the angel’s torso to brace it there. Then he felt down his other arm, which was fine except his dislocated shoulder, which he popped back into place and braced. He moved down to the angel’s legs, both of which were fine enough, though as far as Dean could tell, he thought his right knee may be hyperextended. Just to be sure, he put another splint there.

He hesitated for a moment before gently pressing along the bones of the wings, which made the angel cry out low in his throat, and Dean figured he didn’t have the strength alone to set a wing bone or the tools to make sure it stayed that way, so he gently bent the wing into a better position and got to work wrapping some of the worse abrasions with gauze.

When he was done he looked up to where Sam was leaning against the car. Dean did a coded gesturing and Sam replied in kind before jumping into the driver’s side. Dean heard the smooth chug of his Baby coming to life as he moved his eyes back to the angel.

It was obvious that the angel was rich, or from a rich family, not only because of the angel’s thick woolen clothing and fur lined hood, but also the rich blue dyes and embossed figures in the leather. Though this was far from regulation dress for human soldiers, Dean had seen enough Angels for afar to know what to look for and what it meant. Three rings of blue feathers were embossed around his neck, signifying he was the Captain of his garrison.

After the car was parked almost on top of them, Dean asked Sam to get the stretcher out of the back and lay down the back seats. 

Dean slowly eased the angel onto the stretcher, making sure his wings weren’t bent out of order.

Sam hovered over him and Dean let out a low enough sigh that it didn’t make it out of the mask. He changed positions so he was squatting, ignoring pain in his leg, and gestured to Sam to take the other end of the stretcher. They slowly stood, each feeling the abundant weight of the angel in their charge. If he’d been a human being, (well more like if he didn’t have the six foot wings) Dean would have guessed he would weigh less than a buck fifty.

“So, when are we going to acknowledge that we’re currently shoving an Angel into our backseat, Dean?” Sam asked and they slowly eased the stretcher into the Impala.

Dean frowned and furrowed his eyebrows. “Why does it matter that he’s an Angel?”

And that was Sam’s ‘Wow, my brother is the stupidest human alive,’ look. “An Angel hasn’t been seen outside of the Hostly City or a warfront in over two thousand years, Dean. This is kind of a big deal.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “You’re such a drama queen, Sammy. And besides, what was I supposed to do? Leave him for the crows? Or worse, the Demons?”

“Of course not!” And now Sam was all roosty and indigent. “But this is going to be the talk of the Zone. Maybe the city. I just feel like we need to be prepared, Dean.”

“I am prepared, Sam. As long as this angel needs my help, I’m prepared to give it to him.”

-

Dean set the angel up in one of the two rooms in the Office more appropriate for a semi-permanent residence. He spent the rest of the afternoon stitching cuts and setting bones and wrapping casts and splints, and by the time he was done, he’d spent six hours in the room alone in the radiant Grace of the angel, except for the half hour Sam had come to help set a couple of the bones in his wings.

Before he left the room to get a clean set of clothes from upstairs he soothed some pain relieving syrup and some sleeping drought down the angel’s throat and gently brushed the hair out of his face.

Something about the angel made him feel utterly needed.

-

A few days later the angel was still asleep, but his wounds were doing well and as far as Dean could guess, there was no serious damage internally from the broken bones.

Dean went about his day to day life, remembering to check to make sure the angel was exercised daily to delay atrophy. He was uncertain how to exercise the wings properly, so he settled for bending them a few times back and forth, to and fro, in and out.

He also had an IV set up, even though Sam insisted on the fact that Angels don’t need sustenance. Dean had rebutted with the question of when Sam had ever heard of an injured Angel and that had shut him up.

His regular patients asked lots of questions about the angel. Which only made sense because while Mister Fitzgerald had told Garth to tell only Dean, he had a pretty big mouth and was dating one of the biggest gossips Dean had ever known, Becky Rosen, which meant almost the entire Zone knew that the body found in the cemetery was an angel, and that Dean was keeping him in his back examination room by the end of the second day the poor guy was there.

Some of the more ballsy old ladies (Misses Wizowski, for one) tried to sneak back to get a glimpse, claiming that their dementia was acting up and they forgot that Exam Room One was the first door on the left and not the last one on the right.

To tell God’s honest truth, Dean was getting really sick of all of the hub-bub and just wanted life to go on as normal.

Or at least as normally as it could with a comatose Angel in the back room.

-

It was a week and a half after Dean found the angel that he seemed to hit a road block.

The angel’s hair was a royal rat’s nest. Which, yes, is to be expected when the hair in question almost reaches the angel’s knees and after a fall like the angel seemed to take (if the crater he was in was anything to go by) and the injuries the angel had, but it was kind of a pain in Dean’s ass.

So on top of the normal things Dean would have to do for a comatose patient (sponge baths, catheter changes, muscle exercise, IV drips), Dean also had to groom the angel’s feathers and brush his hair weekly. He distinctly tried to ignore the fact that it took about the four hours to wash the fucking things, because while it was very time consuming, Dean was left with a strong sense of peace low in his tummy, like he never felt before, or at least since he was very young and in his mother’s arms.

Truth be told, Dean would not have even thought to wash the angel’s hair or his wings if Sam hadn’t mentioned in passing that Amelia (the town veterinarian and also the current apple of Sam’s eye) just got a bird in her office that was sick because he couldn’t take care of his wings and his owners weren’t doing it either. Which made Dean worry that maybe angel wings worked the same way, and that if he didn’t groom them for the angel, he would be in pain.

And from there, it only seemed logical that if he was going to take the four hours to groom the angel’s wings, he might as well take the half hour to wash his hair.

So Dean washed up the angel every Sunday morning and then spent the afternoon washing his Baby, as previous tradition dictated.

Dean also got in the habit of checking on the angel for quick minutes between patients. He found the constant inflation and deflation of the angel’s chest soothing and grounding between telling old women that he cared about that they probably wouldn’t live to see their grandson’s graduation or fraught mothers that the only thing to do for their baby’s pneumonia was to wait it out.

It got to the point where he would sit at the high counter along the wall on a stool to do paperwork at the end of the day, occasionally looking up to make sure the angel was still breathing. For some reason doing his work there made time pass much faster and he tended to leave work much happier than he used to.

-

Dean heard a light shuffling by the doorway and turned to see Sam smiling softly.

“Yes?” Dean asked standing and ordering his papers. Sam only usually came to collect him when  it was particularly late. Usually when dinner was almost ready.

“You seem taken with him,” Sam said, “the angel.”

Dean glared at him and started shoving his papers together more fiercely. “I’m not taken with him. I can't be taken with someone who's comatose. I don’t even know him. I don't even want to know him. In more than a patient-doctor manor. Because he's a patient. And an Angel, for Michael's sake!"

The giant, ‘I’m your littler brother and I live to piss you off’ smirk that took over Sam’s face made Dean glare even harder at him. “Pretty defensive over an angel.”

“Shut up, Sam!"

Dean hobbled over to where the angel laid and gently shifted the blanket a little further up his body. He swept a hand through the hair at his temple.

“But seriously, Dean. I’ve never seen you more...at ease than you have been these past few weeks. I’m happy that...Whatever he’s providing for you, I’m glad he’s doing it.”

Dean retracted his hand like the angel’s hair was on fire.

“Shut up, Sam.”

-

Dean decided to do his daily noon check up on the angel a few minutes early, as Mister FitzGerald, Garth’s grandfather, cancelled on him to go to Garth’s cousin’s birthday a few towns over (Fitzy canceling actually freed up a whole hour that Dean usually had Jo set aside for the old man. Beyond the man being an old friend of his dad's, he was just damn interesting to listen to). It turns out that it was good that good ol’ Fitzy cancelled, because the angel was trying to stand when Dean opened the door. 

“Hey! Hey, just relax! Moving is not your friend!” Dean called when the angel sat up.

From the way he eased himself back down, shifting his wings back into the position Dean had put them in, (which comforted him, as he was very worried that he’d done more damage than good in that department) Dean could see that the angel either trusted him or was as weak as a human while injured and didn't want to anger the person with the upper hand.

“I-I don’t know if you...speak English? But -- oh, wait, obviously you do, because you laid back down. Okay, so I’m Dean. Dean Winchester. But you can all me Dean. Can you -- What are you called?”

“Castiel,” and yeah, that was definitely a masculine voice, so ‘he.’ Or maybe ‘it.’ Dean had only ever heard of Angels referred to as ‘it,’ because they weren’t people, only celestial power condensed to fight on the earthly plane. Dean had only been calling the angel by male pronouns because he didn't have breasts. Also Dean had only ever heard anti-Angel activists say anything about Angels, so he really had no clue what to say or do, if 'it' was derogatory or not.

Dean bit his lip and decided on how to ask what gender pronoun to call the angel. “Look, I’ve been calling you, ‘the angel’ in my head since I found you a month ago, and it’s kind of tiring, so what pronoun do you like?”

“I lack gender, but if you must ascribe to something so binary, then masculine ones could work, as I have a male vessel.”

“Vessel?” Dean asked.

“What Angels call their earthly forms,” he replied, looking out the window to where the children’s park sat across the street.

Dean moved to the foot of the bed where Castiel’s chart was hanging from the metal frame. He lifted it and crossed out where he had simple put “the Angel” and replaced it with “Castiel.”

“Alright, well, Castiel. I’m the one who’s been working on healing you, and from what I can tell, your right arm’s radius and ulna are broken, three ribs on your right side as well, hyperextended your right knee, broke your humerus in your right wing, and you’re covered in abrasions anywhere from a light scratch to the stab that nicked an artery in your left femur and the four inch long gash on your head.”

Dean looked up from his notes to see that Castiel was looking at him very intently, head cocked to his left, and unearthly blue eyes incredibly wide.

“Do you...have any questions?”

“No. However, I am...hungry, I believe.”

“You believe? You don’t know?” Dean raised an eyebrow and didn’t really know what to say. How does a grown-ass man not know if he’s hungry?

“I also wish to cut my hair.”

Dean finally closed his mouth and gave a brusque nod. “Yeah. Soup and scissors, okay.”

-

Dean returned in short order with a tray of soup and silverware with some scissors on the side. He pulled the trolly table over Castiel’s lap and placed the tray on it. He carefully sat on the edge of the bed on the opposite side, angling it to easily maneuver so he could feed the angel. Then he leaned forward and lightly pulled on Castiel’s shoulders, supporting his weight while tucking another supporting pillow behind his back so that he could sit up while he ate.

He brushed the angel’s hair out of his face, tucking it behind his ears before he even thought about it. Castiel pulled the confused cocked head look again and Dean could feel his ears get warm with a blush.

Right. Don’t be weird, Winchester. Whatever you’ve been...feeling about this angel isn’t relevant because whatever you came up with in your head about him is bound to be leagues different than reality. It’s time to stop fantasizing and time to start helping him back into angelic shape.

He scooped up some soup and moved it towards Castiel’s mouth, who opened and closed his mouth around the spoon. Dean slid it from his mouth and scooped up some more.

“I figure once you’re done your soup, I’ll cut your hair, then I'll check your stitches to make sure you haven’t pulled any,” Dean told the angel, who nodded lightly around another mouthful of spoon.

Castiel swallowed and asked, “You had said I had been asleep for a month?”

Dean nodded. “Yeah. The caretaker for the Zone cemetery, Mister Fitzgerald, found you when he was cutting the grass one morning. He sent his son, who works for me, and my brother and I went and got you. You’ve been in this back room ever since.”

“You did a fair job taking care of my wings, for a human,” Castiel complimented before taking another mouthful of soup.

“What little I know about angels isn’t really about their wings, so I had to apply some stuff from birds. I’ve been trying to groom them, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

“Thank you,” Castiel said, dipping his head a bit. “I will probably not be able to groom them myself until at least my ribs are healed, but if you are willing, I can give instructions?”

Dean nodded, "About that. You've slept through most of your recovery time and most of your bones should be healed in the next few weeks. Some of your minor abrasions have already healed, but I think your wings and ribs need a month or two." By the time he was done explaining, he'd finished feeding Castiel and set down the empty bowl onto the tray. “Now for that haircut?”

The angel looked from where he was staring at the spoon Dean just put down. "Yes, please. And maybe more food after?...I'm still a bit hungry." He seemed almost regretful, shamed.

"Yeah, of course," Dean assured. He looked at Castiel and felt the weight of the heavy scissors in his hand. "Maybe we should see if we can ease you into a chair? That should be the easiest way to cut it, otherwise the back probably won't be even."

Castiel nodded and shifted forward a little bit, a noise came from the back of his throat, and Dean knew that if it were a human doing this with the same injuries, it would have been a full, guttural groan. Dean managed to help him into the stool he’d been using in the evenings, a pillow from the bed supporting his lower back. He ran his hand through it a few times, glad Sam had reminded him to brush it when he was washing the angel of dried blood.

The hair was long, past the seat of the chair when Castiel was sitting up straight, and black as night, a blue tint shown in the light, and it was while Dean was staring at it glimmering in the light framed by big black wings that Dean seemed to finally realize he was touching an Angel, something no one he had ever known had done.

As far as he knew, something no human had done.

"Have you done this before?" Castiel asked and Dean dropped his hand and took a step back.

“What?”

Castiel cocked his head to the side, and Dean could see in the windowpane that he had the same confused face as before. “Have you cut hair before?”

Dean almost felt relieved then internally smacked his forehead. Why would an angel ask him if he’d touched an Angel before? "Not for an angel, but I cut my own hair, Sam's, a few patients who have trust issues." The angel lightly nodded his head. "How short do you want it?" 

The angel cocked his head to the side again and shrugged slightly, closing his eyes. "A little longer than yours?"

Dean nodded, the realized that Castiel couldn't see that and murmured in the affirmative. "In that case..." Dean trailed off, grabbing some string from a shelf and tied a sort of low ponytail in Castiel's hair, then, in a quick movement, he cut just above the tie. "Well, there's most of it."

"My head feels much lighter," Castiel said, lifting an unbroken arm to feel his lack of hair with a scratched up hand.

"Which is expected, I'm pretty sure you just lost half your body weight," Dean joked.

"No," Castiel said, full of confusion, "I'm sure I weigh more than that. My wings alone-"

"It was a joke, Cas."

"Cas?"

Dean flushed again, this time around his ears and down his nose. "Uh, sorry. I could...uh, not. I mean, it's just a nickname. A habit I have-"

"What's a 'nickname,' I think you said?" Castiel asked. "My name is not 'Nick?'"

"A term of, well I guess, a term of endearment, based off your given name or a personality trait or something. My mom called me ‘Freckles.’" Dean explained, then hastened to add, "But like I said, I could not. If you only like 'Castiel.'"

Castiel cocked his head to the side again, seemed to be thinking. "I do not mind."

"Okay, then."

And Dean stepped back up to the back of Cas's chair, scissors in hand.

-

Cas healed pretty quickly, after waking. It wasn’t at the rate that Angels would normally heal (or at least that’s what Cas told him) but fast enough that it was weird for Dean to experience. The last thing to heal was the humerus in his right wing, which had just passed Dean inspection this morning. (He had almost asked Amelia to come in and take a look at them, but when he'd broached the subject with Sam he'd been given a look that would make people who didn't deal with that during puberty wilt.)

Cas had taken to wandering around the Office when he wasn't reading "human literature" or napping (well, Dean called it napping, Cas said it was a meditative healing state, but Dean was pretty sure he'd heard the angel snoring once or twice). All the little old ladies that had previously nagged at Dean for drinking and cooed at Sam's hair were enraptured with the angel. Their boasting of his beauty and marveling at his wings made Cas's face cover with an odd combination of confusion and pride. Once Dean told him that humans were inherently vain and said they were complimenting him the best ways humans knew how, the angel would just preen like a proud cockatoo under their ministrations.

But it appeared that Cas's favorite thing to do was help Jo at the front desk. He liked walking Dean's patients to the appropriate rooms and asking them about their days. He was even better that Jo and Sam at remembering every name they said and could easily ask them about their twenty-seven cats or which grandchild didn't come to visit like they were supposed to do.

Jo was also quite taken with the angel. Not in a romantic way, but in a "what are you, I like it," sort of way. Ever since Dean and Sam had taken Cas to Harvell's (Jo's mom's bar) and he had drank more in less time than anyone Jo had ever seen and had only had the beginnings of a buzz, she couldn't get over herself around him.

Which is why it surprised Dean when she said she had to leave the Office.

-

Dean walked into work one morning, after running to get some coffee for Sam, Jo, and him (Cas had discovered that while he enjoyed coffee more, it gave him a weird high, so Dean kept him strictly off the bean and gave him tea whenever the rest of them had a mug of joe in hand). He peeled off his mask and jacket, leaving them on the hook by the door.

Jo was already at the reception desk, which was weird, as she usually came in after him. She was fidgeting with the things on her desk, lifting them up and setting them down an inch to the left than moving them back.

"What's up, Jo?" Dean asked, setting her coffee down in front of her, along with the bag of pastries hanging from his pinkie finger.

Instead of digging into the bag for her usual Danish, she just looked up at Dean with something like regret in her eyes. "Dean, I can't work at the office anymore."

Dean blinked a few times and stared back at her. "Why?"

"I just can't, okay, Dean! I can finish out the week, but then I'm leaving."

Dean frowned at her, "Jo, I've known you since before I can remember, you think I can't tell when you're hiding something? What's going on?"

"It's none of your business, alright, Dean! This is none of your concern!" Her mouth was a furious dash across her face and she turned away from him.

"Jo, you're practically my sister, and now you’re telling me you’re business isn’t my business? What the hell is going on!?" he yelled, twisting her around.

"I was drafted, okay?!" Jo was crying now, her hands in front of her to stop him from oncoming any closer. "I was drafted, and I want to go, but I know how you feel about it, and how mom feels about, and I didn't want to deal with it, so I was going to pretend to run away!"

Dean stared at her in shock for a moment, not knowing what to say. The image of Jo all geared up, lying bloody on some battle field rested just on the inside of his eyelids and he didn't want to see it.

"Jo! You can't! Do you know what it would do to your mother if you died?" Dean asked, grabbing hold of her shoulders tight in his hands. "Do you know what it'd do to Bobby? To Sam and me? You're not cut out for war! And you could get out of it so easily! You're an only child with a father who died in the war!"

Jo shook off his hands. "But I don't want to get out of it, Dean! I want to help the cause! Why shouldn't I be able to help?! You did! Sam did! Hell, Cas did! My father died for the cause, and I want to hold up his honor!"

"Yeah, Jo, he died. He died fighting a fruitless war for a group of dickbags who didn't care to learn his name!" Dean shouted, chest heaving. He threw his hands into his hair. "Jo, please, just think about it. Just take a little bit of time to reconsider."

Jo looked at him hard for a second, then she shook her head. "No, Dean. I've already thought about it, and I don't need to anymore. I'm leaving Saturday for the city. Whether you like it or not." And with that she left the reception area to the back room where the patient's files were.

-

Most of the day passed in awkward silence and heated stares. Jo wouldn't talk to Dean and Dean wouldn't talk to her.

Sam and Cas played as a buffer between the two, with Sam acting haughty about doing it and Cas mostly confused.

It took until lunch for Sam to break and ask what the fuck was up, as Jo had said she was going to go eat lunch with some friends and Dean had merely grunted in her general direction.

"Okay, Dean. Spill," Sam said, sitting backwards in the patient consultation chair in Dean's office. Cas was standing stock still in the corner of the room, which is where he'd been since Dean had came into his office after Fitzy left.

"What's there to spill, Sam?" Dean asked, looking up from his paper work. He laced his fingers together along the edge of the desk and leaned against his hands.

"I think Sam wants you to share your information about Jo with him, not actually spill anything," Cas interrupted.

Dean and Sam turned to look at him for a moment before shaking their heads in unison. "I know, Cas. But good job parsing that," Dean said, rolling his eyes. Cas frowned and crossed his arms. "Anyway." Dean looked hard at his brother for a moment, before looking back down to his paper work. Fitzy's blood pressure has been running too high lately.

"Jo got drafted and she wants to go. She's leaving Saturday."

Dean saw Cas's head jerk up from where he'd been examining his shoes and Sam freeze in his seat.

"Dean, we can't let her go!" Sam said emphatically, jumping out of his seat.

Dean continued making notes in Fitzy's chart. "She's a grown ass woman, Sam. I can't control her. She has every right to do this if she wants."

Sam frowned hard at his brother and shook his head. "That's bullshit, Dean, and you know it!"

"I tried talking to her about it. She won't listen to me." Dean leaned back in his chair and threaded his fingers over his stomach.

"Does Ellen and Bobby know?"

Dean shrugged. "I don't know." He looked to where Cas's wings were ruffed up and twitching in place, clearly agitated. "What's with the antsy-pants, wings?"

Cas frowned. "Jo is going out to the front, yes? That is what you mean by 'drafted?'"

Dean frowned, "Yeah, why?"

"I find myself...anxious at the thought of her getting hurt," Cas admitted in that way he always admitted his more human tendencies, with a little bit of shame.

Dean smiled at him from one corner of his mouth. "That's okay, Cas. I am, too."

-

"Samuel John Winchester, you had no right!" Dean heard Jo shout from Cas's room.

He looked up to where the angel was reading a book about how to make guns, to see the angel staring right back at him. He nodded and they both started towards the front.

Jo had still been giving Dean the silent treatment that morning (two days after Jo told him her plans), and had again gone down to her mom's bar for lunch.

"Joanna Beth, don't you yell at that boy! You had no right to keep this from me!" Dean flinched when he heard Ellen Harvelle-Singer shout at her daughter. It wouldn't exactly be correct to say that Dean was afraid of Ellen, but it'd be more incorrect to say he wasn't.

When Dean and Cas got out to the reception area, they saw that the three aforementioned parties were also joined by Bobby. Dean sidled up to him and asked in a low voice, "What's got the ladies' panties in twist?"

Bobby replied in kind, "Sam told us Jo's plans."

"It's my business, mom. Mine! Not yours, not Sam's, not Dean's! Mine!" Jo shouted at her mother. Her face was thunderous and her legs were set a shoulder's width apart, hands splayed on her hips, directly mirroring her mother.

"Joanna Beth, you've said a lot of stupid things in your twenty-two years, but this takes the cake!"

"What in the Hell is that supposed to mean?" Jo asked,  mouth drawn tight. If there was one thing Dean knew Jo hated, it was to be called stupid.

"We are your family, Jo. Your family! Like Bobby always says, 'Family don't end in blood,' and he's right!" Ellen's voice started to shake. "Do you know how much it would devastate us if you died, Jo? How it would ruin us?" Ellen's hand raised to her mouth. Bobby wheeled himself to be next to her, placing a hand on her lower back. "You're all I've got left of Bill, Jo. All I've got left of your daddy."

Jo stared hard at her mother for a moment, then her chin started to shake. "Mom, I'm doing this for him. To honor him. To thank him, I guess. Please just support me."

Ellen looked down at Bobby, who nodded and Ellen nodded back and Jo fell into her mother's arms and Dean felt nausea take over his stomach before he swallowed it down and accepted the fact that Jo might die.

-

"You want to...work, for me?" Dean asked, sitting on the edge of the stool in Cas's room. It was the day before Jo was set to leave and Cas had asked Dean to join him in his room for a moment.

The angel was standing in the window, facing Dean with his hands lightly placed on his hips. "Yes, Dean. Jo has been training me since Monday, in secret, and she says I could easily take over her duties come next Monday."

Dean looked at him blankly for a moment, then nodded. "Well, yeah, I guess. I mean with Jo leaving to fight that stupid fucking war, I suppose we'll need a receptionist?"

The grin that took over Cas's face was like nothing Dean had seen before. The wide smile seemed to overtake not only the angel's face, but his entire body. He seemed to hold his head higher, his shoulders broader, his back straighter. The angel's unearthly blue eyes were brighter than Dean had ever seen.

But Dean just couldn't understand why. Why would the angel want to stay here with him instead of returning to his Garrison? His friends? His family? The Angelic life just seemed so much more than the human life Dean lead. He had never seen the Hostly City in person, but the photos in the newspaper showed a beautiful, clean city in gold and silver. How is the Black Zone of the worst city in the Middle Kingdom any better? How is Lawrence, with it's poverty and sickness and pain and the inevitability of death better than the eternal youth of an Angel's life?

When Dean finally refocused on Cas (it took him an embarrassing long amount of time realize he'd even zoned out), the angel was doing his head tilt of confusion.

"What is wrong, Dean?" Cas asked, taking a step forward.

Dean hesitated for a moment then steeled himself a little bit. "I just don't get why you want to stay here, I guess."

Cas blinked and shifted his wings in the nervous manor Dean had grown accustomed to seeing. He turned his body away a little bit and looked down. "You and Sam have shown me more kindness in the past two months that I have never received in the Host."

"But why not go back to your garrison? They must have treated you fine."

"I could not even if I wanted to, Dean," Cas said simply, but he looked down, something he did when he didn't want to make eye contact. "They would not accept me back, with my hair as short as it is."

Dean felt dread take over his entire body. "You -- did I mess up? I, I thought you wanted it short?"

Cas looked up at his panicked voice. “It is not your fault, Dean. It is a test that all Angels take when they...feel doubt.”

“Doubt?” Dean asked.

The angel nodded and moved around to sit on his bed. His back was just as erect as if he was standing and he stared hard into Dean’s eyes. “Doubt is a serious thing for Angels, Dean. If an angel doubts the Host, doubts Michael, to the rest of the Host it is tantamount to doubting God, to treason.”

Dean’s lip lifted in revolt. “So what, you’re supposed to just follow blindly?”

“That is what trust is, what faith, is, Dean,” Cas answered. “The hair test is a test of trust. If an angel still believes in the Host and that which they do, their hair will grow back. Though in retrospect I believe I did it more as an absolute ending to my life with Them, as, if I still had faith, my bones would have healed almost instantly. The fact that I needed to be here at all shows my doubt in my brethren.

“And with my doubt so prevalent, they would have had no choice but to turn me over to Zachariah.”

“Zachariah?”

“My commander. Michael’s right hand. He was really a heinous individual, I could not stand him. And he knew it. He would send my Garrison on the worst missions, to the deepest parts of Hell, to do the worst things." Cas seemed hesitant for a moment. "Dean there is something I've been wanting to share with you. I...did not know how, however."

Dean looked at him for a moment, expectant for him to continue. When the angel didn't, he prompted, "What is it, Cas?"

The angel stared at him hard for a moment longer, then looked back down to his folded hands in his lap. "Dean, when you were serving in the army, how were you injured?"

Dean frowned at the non sequitur, then rubbed where he knew there was a massive scar on his upper thigh. When he spoke, it was in the monotone he always used to discuss his time in the army. "I was on a special operation with a group of men I hand picked, trying to infiltrate this lair, I guess you'd call it, of this bitch named Lilith. She was a bad mother fucker, you know? And they needed information on her. But she found us, before we found an in, trapped us in this giant room, the six of us against sixty of her most ruthless. Sam was working comms back at base camp, overheard it all, called in back up. A group of -"

Dean stopped himself. Cas looked at him hard. "Cas, a group of Angels came to save us, but by the time they got there, I was the only one alive."

"Dean, I was the angel that saved you."

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this about two years ago and just found it when I was cleaning up my computer.
> 
> There are a few more scenes written that take place after this, but don't really make sense without the stuff unwritten in my head. I may post more eventually, but I'm not sure yet.


End file.
